Oldcastle Precast Contributes to Cleaning Chesapeake Bay

Oldcastle Precast, a manufacturer of precast and polymer concrete in the United States, and part of Oldcastle, Inc., the U.S. arm of international building materials company CRH, said it has supplied two precast concrete clarifiers to Algaewheel Technologies for a nutrient removal system at the Hopewell, Va., municipal wastewater treatment facility.

“We are extremely pleased to be part of this ground-breaking project being built by Thieneman Construction and Algaewheel Technologies,” said Steve Kingsland of Oldcastle Precast’s National Sales, Marketing & Engineering Group said. “Algaewheel’s algae-based wastewater technology being used for the facility is also the central component in our green line of Maxpac-packaged wastewater treatment plants and Bacpac on-site systems. Solar energy is used to convert nutrients in the waste stream directly to valuable algae biomass, while consuming CO2.”

The Algaewheel system is part of a 100,000-gpd, bolt-on nutrient removal pilot system for the Hopewell municipal facility that discharges to the Chesapeake Bay watershed. Algae biomass created from the process, also known as “green coal,” will be used for biofuel production, cogeneration, or fertilizer. The Hopewell facility started operation in December 2010.